Looking back, there's no question that a lot of hands helped punk and hardcore achieve the stature they enjoy today. True, Patti Smith released the first punk record in 1974 (the “Piss Factory” single) and, yes, The Ramones both set and leveled the foundation on which virtually every band who has even considered calling itself a punk group has played. Granted, Black Flag gets a lot of credit for breaking the ground and settling many of the paths punk would travel along during the 1980s (as do Minor Threat, The Minutemen and innumerable others) and Bad Religion justifiably gets kudos for founding Epitaph Records and providing the house from which the second wave of punk would spring in 1994, but the inconvenient truth for just about everyone on Earth is that the Circle Jerks may have been the most important and successful punk band to walk onstage before Nirvana, Green Day, The Offspring and Rancid made it safe to like punk rock and still sit at the cool kids' table in high school.
Don't think it's true? Look at the facts:
Those are the facts and they're all presented faithfully in My Career As A Jerk, but that they are the facts still seems unbelievable, in hindsight. It's unbelievable that this little band of guys who all either walked or were tossed out of other bands turned out to be the best of their vintage, but it suddenly comes into perfect focus with the testimonies of Keith Morris, guitarist Greg Hetson, bassists Earl Liberty and Zander Schloss and drummer Lucky Lehrer – they were the band of underdogs who showed everyone that, not only could they succeed beyond all of their peers, the only ones who could count them out were they, themselves.
Because the story is both so great and so unlikely, My Career As A Jerk does go out of its way to tell as complete an account of The Circle Jerks' story as possible – beginning with the birth of the band in 1979 after Keith Morris' departure from Black Flag and Greg Hetson's departure from Redd Kross (the original lineup included Morris, Hetson, bassist Roger Rogerson and drummer Lucky Lehrer) and running all the way up through the formation of Morris' new band OFF! in 2009. Through that run, the film depicts images which are fantastic, but not all of them are glossy or pretty; discussions of the decidedly “un-straight-edge” vices of beer and cocaine as well as Keith Morris' abuse of both through the darker years in the , and the group's desire to be the biggest band in the world are presented with knee-buckling candor, as is the in-fighting which always plagued the group and the disillusionment which manifested after Morris left the band to form OFF!. Nothing is glossed over and no effort is made to spare feelings as Morris' arrogance is painted pretty plainly both through old concert footage and new, on-camera interviews and Greg Hetson's insecurity gets presented initially when he confesses that he wasn't a very good guitar player when the Circle Jerks started before the hints of a bruised ego emerge when the guitarist confides that he can't understand how everything fell apart while simultaneously name-dropping Bad Religion as well as his position in that band.
At every turn throughout the film, My Career As A Jerk takes great care to stay as “real” as possible (that is, there are no myth-making attempted – viewers simply get the Circle Jerks warts, flaws and all here) and succeeds brilliantly because of its “honesty above all else – band members and egos be damned” viewpoint. It might sound bizarre, but that somehow suits both the Circle Jerks as well as the general attitude which was always within the band perfectly; occasionally bordering on crass, the dry-eyed and ambitious but also unsure tenor endures through My Career As A Jerk from top to bottom just as it did through both the band itself as well as every note of music they ever made. This documentary is perfect.
Artist:
www.wegotpowerfilms.com
www.facebook.com/pages/The-Circle-Jerks
See Also:
Circle Jerks – My Career As A Jerk trailer
DVD:
Circle Jerks – My Career As A Jerk is out now on MVD Visual. Buy it here on Amazon .
